


Tiny Towns

by diablo77



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Young Adult Romance, Bees, Disability, F/M, First Time Sex, Meg/Cas Big Bang 2017, TW: Suicidal Ideation and Attempt (mentioned), Wheelchair User Meg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 13:24:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 17,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12321924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diablo77/pseuds/diablo77
Summary: College sophomore Cas Shurley experiences a mental breakdown and a failed suicide attempt that leave him with a spinal injury he will spend the summer healing from - far away from his friends and his life, in the middle of nowhere with his eccentric aunt. The summer's one saving grace might be the daughter of her even stranger neighbor, a girl named Meg who has long since come to terms with her own disability but hasn't quite figured out how to let anyone get close to her.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Meg/Cas Big Bang 2017. Thanks to septembertuesday for the beautiful artwork. <3

 

**Part One**

Cas woke up in a very white room. Through the sideways slit of one half-open eye, he could see that he was lying on his side in a soft white bed, surrounded by white tile and linoleum, bright white tubes of fluorescent light suspended above. Even the iron rails of the rollaway bed were painted white.

Cas had a sudden recollection of being small and imagining that this was what Heaven looked like: brilliant white rooms in long white corridors like the one he could see through his slightly ajar door.

When a young woman with long dark hair and electric blue eyes strode into the room and began checking a series of gauges and monitors around Cas’s bed, he tried to speak to her, but his jaw seemed oddly disconnected, his words tumbling loose and slurred out of the corners of his mouth. “Am I dead?”

She fixed those otherworldly eyes on him. “You’re lucky you’re not,” she said. “You must have had someone watching over you.”

As the woman turned and left the room, Cas remembered the feeling of his body twisting in the air above the black water of the reservoir, the surprisingly hard impact when he hit the surface. He tried to move his legs and realized he couldn’t. His arm moved, though with a little difficulty, and when he lifted the sheet on the bed and pulled it back, he could see that his entire body below the waist was encased in some kind of splint.

While Cas was pondering the implications, his room door edged open wider and another woman walked in, pushing an empty wheelchair. This woman, Cas _did_ recognize, though it had been many years since he’d last seen her.

“Aunt Amara?”

She smiled, in a certain way she had that made it seem as if doing so was difficult for her. “Hello there, Angel,” she said.

Cas cringed at her referring to him that way, as if he were still a little kid, but he did feel a secret sense of relief to see someone he knew. “Where’s Dad?” he asked.

“He had to go back to work. You were out for a few days, there.”

 _Out for a few days?_ Cas didn’t like the sound of that. Amara went on, “Besides, you’re in my neck of the woods right now, and I’ve got free time. It seemed like the best idea for me to look in on you for now.”

“Your neck of…” Cas remembered visiting his aunt when he was small. She lived on a rambling plot of land that might have been called a farm if she’d bothered to grow or raise anything organized there, rather than just let nature run it over with whatever wanted to come up. It was in a rural area in the southern tip of the state, and, as Cas remembered it, there wasn’t much of anything or anyone else around. “Why am I out here?”

“This is the best youth hospital for spinal injuries in the region. You’re actually really lucky we were able to get you in here.”

Cas focused for a moment on wondering whether an almost-twenty-year-old college sophomore still counted as a youth and almost missed registering the other half of his aunt’s sentence. “Wait – _spinal_ injuries?”

“No permanent damage, it looks like, thankfully, but you’ll have a long recovery ahead of you. You took quite a spill there.” She kept smiling as she spoke, but something in her eyes let Cas know she was aware that his fall was no accident. “Come on.” She patted the back of the wheelchair. “Let’s get you out of that bed and out into the world for a bit.”

Cas had no desire to do anything of the sort, but he felt like he’d let everyone down enough already. He let his aunt brace her hand behind his back and help him swing his legs over the side of the bed, then lift from under his arms to transfer him into the chair. He was surprised by her strength; she was a petite woman with long thin arms, but she lifted him as if he weighed nothing.

As she wheeled him out into the common area, Cas saw the white walls break up into brightly colored decorations, explosions of color splashed across the walls and the rugs staggered along the linoleum floor. As Cas had suspected, there were areas with toys and clusters of much younger children, but there was also an area full of colorful, overstuffed sofas where several teenagers and even a few who seemed to be a few years older were lounging and talking. Amara pushed Cas right into the center of the group.

Cas was mortified. The others in the group were mostly dressed in the same soft white pajama-like outfit Cas himself was dressed in, and several of them were sitting in or near various mobility devices, but otherwise they seemed just like the kids at school, the ones who always treated Cas like he was from another planet. When Amara wheeled him into their midst, they looked up, regarded him with what registered to Cas as mild disinterest, and went back to their conversations.

Amara had turned her attention to an exchange with a passing nurse, and after a few minutes of being ignored, Cas decided he’d had enough and gripped the wheels of his chair to leave.

He was startled by how hard it was to maneuver the chair. He’d seen movies and television shows where people in wheelchairs zipped around as if it was the easiest thing in the world, popping wheelies on their back wheels and swiveling around like figure skaters. For Cas, it took enormous effort just to turn around and face away from the couches; he kept bumping into furniture and having to adjust his angle and roll a few more inches.

Once his back was to the kids on the couches, Cas started to plot how to roll himself back to his room. His aunt was still engaged in her conversation and didn’t seem to be paying attention to him at all; he was sure that even with his slow progress he could dodge her and slip back to the safety of that bright white place.

As he was thinking this, he noticed a girl who moved in her chair exactly the way the movies had made him expect he would: quickly, smoothly, gracefully. Hers was small and had a pink frame, and clearly it was intended for long-term use, unlike Cas’s clunky loaner. The girl had long blonde hair streaked through with bright pink, a tiny body, and a very round face. Unlike Cas and most of the other patients, she was dressed in street clothes: lots of black, with a leather jacket despite the warm temperature. She rolled up to the nurses’ station and began talking to the nurses there. Cas couldn’t hear their conversation, but from the familiar way the girl was obviously laughing and joking with them, it seemed like they knew her well.

Cas felt an inexplicable chill run through his body as the girl turned her eyes toward him. He felt rooted to his spot; unwieldy chair or not, he didn’t feel like he could have moved. The girl raised a single dark eyebrow, her lips twisting into an amused smirk. It felt like hours passed before Cas unhinged his jaw to say something to her, but before he could speak, she had turned away again and was rolling off down the hallway.

“There you are.” Cas heard Amara’s voice behind him, moments before he felt her hands plant down on the back of his chair. “Where were you getting off to?”

Cas shrugged. “I got bored,” he said. “Thought I’d go explore.” That, while a lie, seemed slightly more social than the truth that he was going back to his room.

“Oh, Cas.” Amara clucked her tongue. “You need to stop going off by yourself all the time! That was the problem in the first place!”

Cas almost blurted out that that wasn’t the problem at all, but he stopped himself. How could he explain it to his aunt, the odd duck in an odd family, someone who chose to live her life away from people and seemed generally baffled by them most of the time? Of course that explanation would make sense to her, much more sense than the real one. He decided it was easier to just let her go on thinking that.


	2. Chapter 2

The next few days passed and settled into a familiar routine: Cas would wake up in the dazzlingly white room, slowly remember what had happened, and get up to roll around the grounds with his aunt. He didn’t make any friends, and no one really talked to him, but Amara seemed pleased by the mere proximity of her nephew to other young people. Sometimes Cas would look around, trying to catch a glimpse of the girl in the pink chair, but he never saw her. She seemed less interested in socializing than Cas was.

One late afternoon, Amara came into the room and helped Cas into the chair as usual, but instead of steering him toward the social area, she veered off down one of the gleaming white hallways.

“Where are we going?” Cas asked her.

“You’re going to Group today,” Amara chirped, in an unnaturally bright voice.

“What group?” Before she could answer, Amara stopped Cas’s chair in front of the door to some kind of conference room.

Inside, most of the young people from the couches were gathered in a circle. The majority of them were sitting in wheelchairs, but there were a handful of folding chairs scattered in between, their occupants leaning on crutches or the frames of walkers, or sitting awkwardly in braces with a cane dangling from the back of their chair. Cas could not think of any place he was less interested in being at that moment.

At the head of the circle, directly across from Cas, sat the blue-eyed woman he’d mistaken for an angel when he first woke up. For the first time, he noticed that she wore a name badge that said “Hannah.” When she saw Cas enter, she looked up and smiled – actually smiled – and this surprised him. It didn’t quite seem to fit her face. “Welcome,” she said. “Please, join our circle.”

Cas chuckled bitterly to himself, thinking that at least she hadn’t asked him to have a seat. He rolled himself into the only open space he could see, between a tiny girl perched high in a motorized wheelchair and a boy who looked to be around his age who was sitting in one of the folding chairs, legs in braces sticking out in front of him and a pair of crutches leaning against the side of the chair.

Hannah seemed to be continuing to stare at Cas, or rather, at the top of his head. He felt his eyes almost involuntarily rolling upward, as if he could follow Hannah’s to their focal point. “We have a family support group on Wednesdays,” Hannah said. She paused, eyes still fixed above Cas’s head. Finally she added, “This is our older adolescent group. Ages sixteen to twenty-four. No family members.”

“Oh! Yes, I understand,” Amara said from behind Cas, and for the first time Cas realized that she was still standing behind his chair. “See you later, Angel,” she said, bending over to awkwardly squeeze Cas’s shoulders before turning to walk out the door.

Cas was mortified; if his bracketed body would have allowed it, he would have slumped down in his seat. As his aunt left, he heard a small snort of laughter from somewhere on the other side of the circle. He raised his eyes toward it and instantly wished he hadn’t; shining back at him were the deep brown eyes of the girl in the pink chair. She quirked one eyebrow in Cas’s direction as if the two of them shared some kind of scandalous secret before turning her attention back to Hannah.

“So before Cas joined us, we were talking about adjusting to the new realities of our bodies.” Cas bristled a little at the word “our” – Hannah’s body seemed fine to him. She focused on the tall boy with the braces in the seat next to Cas. “Sam, what were you saying about that?”

The boy’s forehead crinkled in a way that made it seem like he was concentrating very deeply. “Well,” he said, “I was just saying how, uh, my girlfriend has been really great. She’s deaf, so she knows what it’s like to have to adapt to the world, being different. But… I don’t know, I feel really guilty for thinking this…”

“It’s okay, Sam,” said Hannah. “There are no bad feelings here.” Cas though he heard the girl in the pink chair snort again, but the boy called Sam didn’t seem to notice.

“Well, it’s just… she’s lived with her disability her whole life,” Sam went on, “so she doesn’t understand sometimes how  _ mad  _ I get that I can’t do the things I used to.”

Hannah nodded, keeping the same blank and thoughtful expression fixed across her smooth pale face. Cas thought back to his aunt telling him that his injuries wouldn’t be permanent; for the first time he wondered whether that was true for everyone there.

He found his mind wandering as the group listened to a younger girl named Alicia talk about how she felt her family members were always sad about her condition, and that made it harder for her to focus on adjusting to it herself.

“Give it time,” said a girl’s husky drawl from next to him, and it took Cas a moment to realize that the girl in the pink chair was speaking. It took him a moment beyond that to realize that he hadn’t yet heard her speak, and had no idea that was what her voice sounded like. “Do what you need to do to take care of yourself. Eventually they’ll realize they have to  _ see  _ you to support you. And if not-” she lifted her eyebrow again as her mouth twisted into a smirk that popped a dimple into her round cheek – “screw ‘em. You can build your own support network if you have to.”

“Thank you for that,” Hannah said, nodding in the girl’s direction. “Would you mind introducing yourself to the group?”

“Everybody knows me.”

“Humor me. We have people who’ve just joined us.” Hannah looked directly at Cas when she said this, and he felt his face grow hot.

To his horror, the girl in the pink chair turned and looked his way too, cutting him from head to toe with a blink of her big dark eyes and flashing him a smile before turning it on the rest of the circle. “Meg,” she said.

The rising blood in Cas’s face reached his ears, creating a roar that drowned out the voices in the circle, making his eyes water so he lowered his head and pretended to be fascinated with his lap.

Hannah and the others in the circle continued talking, and Cas remained aware of the sounds of their voices, but it was like hearing people speaking under water. He couldn’t keep track of any of the words. One thing he did notice was that the girl in the pink chair – Meg – did not speak again. He was certain her voice would have cut through the blur if she had.

He wasn’t sure what it was that drew him to her so strongly – it wasn’t that she was beautiful, though she was, he guessed, in an offbeat sort of way that caught him by surprise. But it was something else, something he couldn’t name, that made him feel like he could just stare at her and listen to her talk forever.

By the time Cas was aware of his surroundings again, the group was ending and the circle dispersing, the others heading out the door and off in various directions while Hannah cheerfully waved them off from the front of the room. Cas looked around for Meg, hoping he could just happen to be moving through the doorway at the same time as her, maybe bump into her – probably literally, considering how much difficulty he was still having in maneuvering his chair – and maybe, just maybe, find the nerve to strike up a conversation. But when he glanced over his shoulder, he noticed her parked up front, having an animated discussion with Hannah.

Cas sighed and pushed himself toward the door. As he did, he nearly ran over the boy he’d been sitting next to. Sam, he remembered Hannah calling him. Standing up, even slightly hunched to hold his crutches, the boy’s height was startling.

“Hey there,” he said, his forehead wrinkling again in that way that made him look deeply concerned. “Cas, was it?” Cas nodded. “How’d you like the group? They get easier, I promise.”

“It wasn’t bad,” Cas said, managing a smile.

Sam smiled back. “Good,” he said, then jerked an elbow in the direction of the hallway. “Well, uh, I gotta get back to my room,” he said. “My brother’s coming to see me, so…”

“I understand,” Cas said, though he actually couldn’t. He couldn’t imagine any of his siblings coming to visit him here.

“Maybe I’ll see you around?” Sam said. He said it like a question, as if he actually cared about Cas’s answer, so a shocked Cas nodded and said he supposed he would. Sam propelled his lanky body off down the hallway, and the others continued to push past Cas and thoroughly ignore him.

At least, Cas noted, his aunt wasn’t hovering in the hallway waiting for him. He started pushing his chair in the direction of his room, focusing his eyes ahead of him down the hall, until he came to a sudden halt amid a clanging of metal. His sense of horror grew as his eyes trailed up from the pair of interlocked wheels at his hand level, to the hot-pink frame attached to the one that wasn’t his, to the laughing dark eyes that seemed to cut right through him.

“Watch it there, Clarence,” Meg warned, the corners of her lips twitching into a teasing half-smile.

“My name is – it’s Cas,” Cas stammered.

“I know what your name is,  _ Angel _ .”

In a flash, Cas saw his aunt in his mind, calling him that and bending to kiss his cheek in front of the circle. Heat flooded his skin. “Okay,” he said, gesturing down the hallway which seemed somehow to have grown longer. “I’m just gonna go die now.”

“Aw, don’t go,” Meg said as Cas started to roll away from her. “Come on, I thought it was – it was kind of cute!” she called after hi. He stopped and turned slightly to the side, just enough so he could turn his head to face her without deviating from his escape route. “Come  _ on _ ,” Meg said, gripping her wheels with both hands and throwing her head back in an exaggerated pout. “I’m bored and there’s no one else interesting here.”

It was a half-step away from an insult, but Cas had to admit that deep down he was a little flattered that she had, ever so slightly, implied that he was interesting.

And that was how it came to be that Cas let Meg lead him through a tangled network of corridors that, unlike the ones he was familiar with, were neither wide nor white; their tiles were dingy shades of beige or gray and sometimes gave way altogether to unadorned cinderblocks. The passages were cramped and in places smelled of mildew or rotting garbage. Cas sensed that they were in the back intestinal system of the hospital, the inner workings never meant to be seen by the public.

Meg glided through the halls with a grace that made it seem like her wheels were just an extension of her body, their movements rolling fluidly into her own muscles so it was almost hard for Cas to tell where her flesh ended and the metal began. Cas himself was having considerably more difficulty, bumping regularly into tight corners and more than once uncomfortably crashing his footrests up against something in his path. He supposed he should be comforted by the returning sensation in his limbs, but the more immediate soreness and frustration at his failure to keep up with Meg occupied too much space in his brain to allow for it.

She reached a bright blue double door with thick strips of black industrial rubber tacked to the bottom. Cas watched as she swung her torso forward, gripped the door, and swung back again, rocking on her wheels and using her momentum to fling the door wide open. She rolled easily through. Cas pushed his wheels as hard as he could and managed to just barely breach the threshold before the door came swinging back with a vengeance and hit him hard in the back, shoving him forward. When the shock wore off, he noticed Meg sitting facing him in her chair a few yards ahead of him, giggling. When she saw that Cas was aware of her, she clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a last escaping snicker. “Sorry,” she said.

Before Cas could open his mouth to protest, Meg had whirled around and was headed off down the hall again. This time, though, she rolled only a short distance before she stopped, in front of an accordion of iron grating which she used her whole body again to peel back, revealing an elevator door.

It was nothing like the gleaming bank of stainless steel and glass elevators near the front lobby of the hospital; this elevator’s door was a dingy gunmetal gray deeply recessed in the cement walls. She pressed a round button next to it, and a dull orange light like the tip of a cigarette glowed behind it. A few moments later, the door opened and Meg rolled inside, sticking her hand out into the door frame to hold the door open for Cas. In his own slower, much less graceful way, he rolled his own chair into the dimly lit cubicle beside hers and watched as she pulled an unraveled paper clip out of her bra and inserted it into a key slot at the bottom of a panel of numbered buttons, marked with the letter  _ R.  _ She gave Cas a conspiratorial look as the elevator creaked to life, and ascended. 

“What is this?” Cas asked, looking around.

“Old service elevator. I don’t think they use it much anymore. But it still works” - there was a shuddering thump and a pause before the elevator resumed its climb - “reasonably well.”

The elevator door opened with a  _ clang  _ and Cas felt a rush of cool air on his face. Meg rolled out ahead of him, flipping her chair’s frame easily over a small hump that took all of Cas’s concentration to conquer, his head down and his body leaned forward to gain the most possible leverage on his wheels. When he was finally on level ground, he set his hand brakes, let go, and looked up. All around him was the bruised blue of a dusk sky, and spread below, a lake of shimmering lights.

“We’re on the roof?” Meg nodded. “How did you know how to get up here?”

She shrugged. “You spend enough time here, you learn things.” Meg pushed her chair closer to the edge of the roof, and Cas swallowed his fear of rolling right off and followed her. He had, after all, been ready to do much worse only a few weeks before.

Cas looked down at the glittering lights spread out below them under the not-yet-dark sky. “Is that the whole town?” he asked.

Meg snorted. “Yeah, not much of a town, huh?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Cas said quickly. “I like it, actually.”

“You don’t have to pretend you like it.”

“I’m not, actually,” Cas said, surprising himself as he realized he meant it. “It seems… calm. Peaceful.” Staring down at the ant-like line of cars moving along the town’s main arterial road, he was hit with a sudden memory. “You know what this reminds me of?” he said, to himself as much as to Meg. “The first time I went up in airplane. I was maybe eleven, or twelve. We’d had a layover, some city, I don’t remember – Minneapolis, maybe, or… Memphis…” he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, I guess. I’d never been there before, and I never went there again. But I just remember watching all the houses and the stores and the cars get smaller and smaller as we went up, and it was like the further up we got, the less you could tell about the neighborhoods down there. You couldn’t tell the new shiny cars from the cruddy ones, you couldn’t tell if that was a liquor store on the corner or like… a fancy coffee shop. And I realized every one of those little people that you couldn’t tell anything about had a whole life, and problems, and things they were going through and people who loved them. And I started feeling like if all the goodness inside me could fit in a paper cup, like those little cups they give you off the drink cart, and I could just… pour it out the window, all over this tiny town, it would be enough to make everything okay for everyone.”

“You were a weird kid,” Meg said, and it was only then that Cas realized she’d moved closer to him. She rested a hand on his thigh, just above the knee, but kept her eyes focused on the lights below them. It was quiet for a moment, and Cas just watched her as a light evening breeze blew her hair around her face. “It’s my last night,” she said finally.

“Last night of what?”

Meg stared at him. “Last night  _ here _ , genius. At the rehab.”

“Oh.” Cas nodded. It made sense; of everyone he’d seen there, Meg seemed, if not the most healed, the most well-adjusted. He thought back to the group session, how confidently she’d spoken:  _ Everybody knows me.  _ “How long were you here?”

“This time? About a month I guess. I had a surgery in May.”

“ _ This  _ time! How many times have you been here?”

Meg silently flipped out fingers from her hands as if she were counting, then threw her hands in the air and laughed. “Just kidding. I’ve lost count.” She seemed to notice Cas staring at her then, and her expression sobered. “I’m a lifer, Clarence. My injury happened at  _ birth.  _ My dad moved to this town to stay close by, because it’s such a good program and I keep having to come back. They keep doing these surgeries as I grow but… they’re just maintenance.” She flung her arms out and looked emphatically down at her legs, then back up at Cas. “This is me.”

“No wonder,” Cas murmured, and only when a strange expression flashed across Meg’s face did he realize he’d said the words out loud. “I just… you just…” he stammered, feeling himself blush under those thunderous near-black eyes. “You seem so comfortable in your skin,” he finished.

Meg softened. Laughed. “Well, what choice do I have?”

“I don’t know,” Cas said. “I’ve had a long time to get comfortable in mine. I don’t think I’m there yet.”

Cas felt Meg’s hand on his leg again and realized she had scooted her chair even closer so that her wheels were touching his and her chair’s frame was angled toward him, their knees inches apart. His eyes wandered up her arm to her face, which was turned his way this time, her eyes focused firmly on his own face. “Meg?” he asked. “What are you…?”

“Shh, shut up, Clarence,” she said softly. “Don’t fuck this up.” The next thing he felt was her lips pressed against his, soft but insistent, the skin below the surface feeling electric and alive where it touched him. He felt her tongue darting between his lips like a little quick fish, and parted them wider in response, letting her in. He could feel her breath quickening, a palpable heat rising between them.

Meg’s hand traveled further up Cas’s thigh as she leaned halfway out of her chair to press her body closer to his own. He placed his hands tentatively at her sides, waiting for her to object, but instead she leaned in to his touch. Slowly, he began to run them up and down, feeling the shape of her, small but solid. Cas could feel Meg smiling against his lips, imagined that already familiar sassy expression on her face as she placed her hands on top of his and moved them under the thin fabric of her shirt, urging him to run them along her bare skin. Cas’s breath caught as his fingertips bumped up against the lacy edge of her bra. Meg’s hand wandered in dangerously close, and she slid away from his lips to whisper in his ear, “Well, I see some things are still in working condition.”

Cas pulled back, his lip twitching as he stared down at his lap. “Geez, Meg,” he muttered.

“What?” Meg laughed. “I’m just having fun!” Her expression turned a shade more serious. “Is this not okay?” The way her eyes rolled down her body, across the space between them, and back up Cas’s own made it clear to him that she was referring not just to what she’d said, but to all of it.

“It’s okay,” Cas said, wanting nothing more in that moment than for her to kiss him again. “It’s more than okay.”

Meg leaned forward again, close enough that Cas could feel their breath blending together and anticipate the electrifying feeling of their lips colliding, but before they made contact, there was a loud clanging of metal behind them. Cas and Meg both turned to see the roof access door  swung wide open and Billie, one of the counselors, standing in its frame with her arms crossed over her chest. “Meg,” she said. “You know you’re not supposed to be up here.”

Meg rolled her eyes in Cas’s direction, but pasted on a smile before turning her head toward the door. “Okay, Billie,” Meg chirped in the brightest voice Cas had ever heard from her – possibly from anyone.

They trailed Billie back into the building, Cas becoming suddenly, acutely aware again of how slow and clumsy his movements were in his chair. “And who are you corrupting this time?” Billie said, looking Cas from head to toe as they rode down in the service elevator.

“Nobody,” Meg said, beaming an angelic smile up at Billie. Cas couldn’t help but wonder whether she meant that she wasn’t corrupting him or that he, himself, was nobody to her.

When they reached the main floor, Billie disappeared into her office with a cock of her head and a private smile to Meg, a twitch of her wide dark eyes that was almost a wink. “Stay in the  _ common  _ areas, hm?” she said.

“Okay, Billie. Sorry.” The office door closed and they were alone in the hall again. “Well, that was fun while it lasted,” Meg said once the door was shut.

Cas tried hard to hide his disappointment; he’d been so hopeful that once Billie was gone, he and Meg would find somewhere else private to pick up where they’d left off, but Meg had already pointed her wheels in the direction of her end of the hallway as if she were poised to roll off down it at any second. For her, it seemed, the moment was over.

Almost as if she sensed what he was thinking, she spun her wheels his way instead, rolled just close enough to drop a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks for an amazing last night,” she said.

“Is that it?”

Meg laughed. “You’re adorable,” she said. Something passed over her face that Cas thought might be a hint of disappointment of her own, but with a quick, dismissing sigh from Meg, it was gone. “It’s past curfew,” she said, “and I leave in the morning. “ _ And _ ,” she said with a pointed smile, “by the time I’m here again, you’ll be long gone.”

“Well,” Cas tried, “maybe we could exchange numbers? Or addresses?”

“I don’t do that,” said Meg. Cas felt as if he had been swiftly kicked in the stomach, and it must have showed in his face because Meg gave him a look of something like pity, which made it even worse. “Just let it be a good memory, Clarence,” she said, pulling his hand into her lap to squeeze it once firmly, then stretching her arm out behind her as she rolled away, letting their fingertips stay linked until she’d gone too far and they slowly frayed apart.


	3. Chapter 3

That night, Cas barely slept. Lying in his hospital bed, he kept traveling back to the feeling of Meg’s body against his, the warmth of her breath as her lips hovered inches from his own in the moment before a kiss. When he closed his eyes, he saw her smooth full face floating above him, heard her laughter echoing from the corners of his room. But when he opened them, he could feel the absence of her, an emptiness that felt thick and tangible.  
Somewhere in the slow gray nothing between night and morning, Cas rolled himself over the edge of the bed and transferred into his wheelchair, pushing himself out into the silent and deserted halls. With no one around, the swish-swish of his wheels on the linoleum echoed through the corridors. Something about this place, empty like this, seemed like exactly the place he had been trying to get to, that day at the reservoir. A place of nothing and no one. He had thought it would be comforting. Peaceful. Instead, it filled him with a kind of anxious dread that sat like a stone in the pit of his stomach.  
He pushed his chair to the big, floor-to-ceiling picture window in the adolescent lounge area. He parked in front of the window and watched the tense-looking dark air behind it lighten shade by shade. When it was still a shade or so darker than what he would call dawn, Cas became aware of sound and movement in the parking lot below. He looked down and saw Meg rolling across the blacktop to a rattletrap old truck parked there, accompanied by Bille, Tessa, one of the night nurses, and a tall man with long gray hair who Cas had never seen before. Meg hugged Billie and Tessa and they loaded her bags into the back of the truck. Then, the tall man lifted Meg’s small body out of her chair and into the passenger seat, then folded up her chair and heaved it into the truck bed with her luggage. He climbed behind the wheel and the old truck coughed to life, slowly rolling out of the parking lot and onto the desolate highway that seemed to lead nowhere in particular. All at once Cas felt that hovering empty he’d been carrying with him through the halls descend and close around him tight as a fist. He couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he rolled himself down the hallway in the direction he’d come and went back to bed.

 

Aunt Amara didn’t come that morning; Cas waited for her until after the cafeteria closed for breakfast, then, since he hadn’t gotten up or dressed for it, he decided in some part of himself not to do those things at all.  
He nestled down in the blankets, tugging them over his head and bunching them up until the thin white fabric still managed to block out the light. He didn’t feel sad, exactly. But something comforting had returned about the feeling of nothingness, cocooned in the sheets. He lay still for so long that his limbs started to feel stitched to the mattress, as if he couldn’t move them even if he wanted to. After a while, not-moving started to feel like a game, like a challenge. Cas didn’t move until he forgot how long it had been since he’d moved, and then the act of moving started to feel like a foreign thing, like turning a word over and over in his brain until the combination of sounds lost their meaning.  
Sometime in the afternoon (he thought), Cas’s phone pinged with a notification and he finally slithered across the bed to retrieve it. His aunt’s name flashed on the screen above a message saying Sorry Angel, I won’t make it today. Maybe not tomorrow either. Wishing you well! She’d sent a little emoji with a kissy face below that. Cas groaned and tossed his phone onto the nightstand, burrowing back down into the soft nothing of his bed.  
The next morning, there was no message, but when breakfast was nearly over and he began to feel the emptiness grinding in his belly, Cas swung his legs out of bed and hoisted his body into the waiting chair.  
He rolled down the hallway to the cafeteria, which was bright and loud and reminded him too much of the ones at high school (where the other students had bullied him) and college (where they’d ignored him). He slipped into a queue of people sliding trays along a silver rail past steaming tubs of food, coming away with some rather rubbery-looking eggs, a tangle of bacon and some buttered toast, which looked all right. He contemplated a glass of orange juice at the end of the line, but he couldn’t figure out how to balance it on his tray and push himself forward without spilling. Sighing, he put it back.  
“Do you want some help with that?” The voice came from both behind Cas and a good deal above him. Cas turned around and followed his eyes up a very long pair of crutches gripped in a very large pair of hands to the face of Sam from Group. Involuntarily, Cas’s eyes flicked back to the crutches which, he figured, would keep Sam’s hands too full even to carry his own tray.  
Sam glanced down in the direction of Cas’s gaze and then tipped his head back up with a laugh. He had an open, friendly laugh that had the odd effect of making Cas feel more at ease, whereas the laughter of his peers usually made his muscles tighten, even when logic told him it probably wasn’t aimed at him. Sam nodded his chin in the direction of his shoulder, indicating something behind him. “My girlfriend is helping me carry my stuff,” he said. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind helping you too.  
As he said it, a small brunette girl stepped out from behind him and looked up – way up – at him with a smile. Sam gestured to her in what Cas eventually realized was sign language. The girl signed something back, then turned toward Cas. “Hi! I’m Eileen,” she said. She spoke with the flat tone of a person who has never heard her own voice, but she had a disarming smile and bright shining eyes that let Cas know her approach was friendly. She pointed at the juice. “Do you want me to carry that?”  
Cas nodded. “Yes, thank you,” he said, he hoped, loudly and clearly.  
Eileen laughed. “You don’t have to shout,” she said. “I won’t hear you either way.”  
Cas felt heat creeping up his neck and spreading across his face. He cast his eyes down to his shoes where they rested on the footrests in front of him. Even though he was slowly getting the feeling back in his legs, in that moment looking at them suspended above the floor, he had the strange feeling that they weren’t attached to his body. He couldn’t make the pieces of him make sense.  
It took a moment for Cas to realize that Sam and Eileen were still standing there and they weren’t laughing  at him. Eileen flashed Cas another dazzling smile and grabbed the orange juice cup back off of the line. “Come on,” she said. “Where are you sitting?”  
“I don’t know,” Cas admitted.  
“You could sit with us,” Sam offered. “I mean, if you wanted…”  
Something about the way he said it made Cas feel like he wasn’t asking out of obligation; like he actually wanted Cas to agree. So, he nodded and rolled along with them to a table near the windows.  
There was a tray already sitting in front of an empty seat, and Eileen slid into the seat and plunked the other one down on the table next to her. Sam maneuvered himself into the seat, tucking the crutches under the table and out of the way. He nudged Cas’s glass toward an empty space at the end of the table. Cas rolled up to the space, locked his brakes, and hoisted his tray onto the table.  
Sitting on the opposite side of the table were a pale young man with short, spiky light-brown hair and young woman with a warm brown complexion and a wild tumble of dark curls. They were both wearing leather jackets, but hers gapped open below where her folded arms rested on the table, and when she lifted them to retrieve her fork and shifted position on the seat, Cas could see that she was heavily pregnant.  
Sam gestured toward them with his own fork. “This is my brother, Dean, and his wife, Cassie.”  
“Hi,” said Cassie.  
“Hey,” said Dean.  
“Hello,” said Cas. Everyone turned back to their plates. As Cas watched them interact from his end of the table, he could tell right away how close the brothers were, from the way they bantered and ragged on each other to the way Dean still seemed to look out for Sam, teasing him about not eating enough with an edge to his tone that gave away that he was actually concerned for his brother’s health.  
Cas felt a strange pang that, at first, he couldn’t identify the source of. He thought maybe it was because he had grown up with a house full of siblings, yet had never in his whole life seen the kind of closeness between any of them as he saw between Sam and Dean. But no, that wasn’t it. It was that everything at this table – the brothers’ bond, the obvious love Eileen and Cassie had for them and they way they even seemed to care for each other, Cassie clumsily signing something to Eileen and Eileen gently correcting her, then placing a hand on the curve of Cassie’s belly – all of it felt so brutally, achingly alive. It rubbed up against the edges of the fact that, not long at all ago, Cas had tried to die.  
Cas finished his breakfast and excused himself with the brightest smile he could manage. He didn’t want to go back to his room, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, so he rolled out into the same adolescent lounge he had hated so much when he’d first arrived. At this time of day, it was all but empty. Cas parked himself in front of the big windows and stared down onto the playground, completely empty below him. If you thought too much about playgrounds, he thought, they stopped making sense. That was the problem with him, ever since his brain broke. He thought about things until they stopped making sense. The playground, out of context, was just a random assortment of metal and rubber objects hanging from chains, iron bars and wooden slabs. He remembered how, when he was small, playgrounds had made him so happy, but looking at all the disjointed pieces now, he couldn’t imagine why.  
“I used to love those.”  
Cas looked up. Sam was standing beside him at the window, but looking straight forward through the glass, not sideways at Cas. He lifted one arm, crutch and all, and pointed with its rubberized tip in the direction of the rings dangling from chains suspended above the wood chips along the highest row of monkey bars. Cas had a hard time picturing Sam ever having been short enough to swing from those rings without his feet dragging on the ground.  
As if he could read Cas’s mind, Sam chuckled, a deep dimple appearing in his cheek. “Of course, I was smaller then,” he said. “I was a late bloomer. I was a shrimp until I was sixteen.”  
Cas continued to try to picture it, found that he couldn’t, and decided it didn’t matter.  
“Did we, uh, did we scare you off earlier?” Sam asked.  
Cas shook his head. “No. I just needed to be…” he searched for the right word and couldn’t find it. Finally he settled for “…elsewhere.”  
Sam nodded. “I understand,” he said, and Cas got the feeling that he meant it, he really did. “I just wanted you to know, you’re always welcome around me. Okay?”  
“Okay.”  
Sam gestured down the hall. “Do you maybe want to come and hang out for a bit?”  
“That’s okay,” Cas said. “I think I want to be alone for a while.” He surprised himself with the realization that he actually did want to be alone – not because he wanted to shut the world out or because it was rejecting him, but because, in that moment when he knew he had a choice, he felt like he would enjoy it. As Sam tapped off down the hall, Cas turned his attention back to the window and the deserted playground outside. A breeze blew through, swinging the toys on their creaking chains and stirring a handful of dead leaves into a brief circular dance just above the ground. Cas felt a small thing in his chest lift for just moment before the leaves settled and it was gone.


	4. Chapter 4

True to his word, Sam did welcome Cas whenever they found their way across each other’s paths and Cas wasn’t in a being-alone mood. Sometimes they’d sit and talk in the lounge; sometimes they’d go to Sam’s room and play video games or watch Netflix on Sam’s tablet. Sometimes Dean or Eileen would join them.

Meanwhile, Cas’s body was getting stronger. When he first wheeled himself into the physical therapy room with its bright blue mats and floor-to-ceiling mirrors, he was shocked at the sight of his reflection. Slumped in his chair, he looked so small and fragile. He’d always been reasonably tall and well-muscled, never the biggest guy in the room but never noticeably small. The time spent inactive and indoors had stripped his muscles of some of their definition and paled his naturally olive complexion, but the most startling change to Cas’s appearance was the question-mark curl of his posture that made him look wizened, like a little old man. Pulling himself up by propping his hands on the armrests of his chair, he straightened his spine and forced a smile in the mirror. It was an improvement, though not much of one.

The figure of Raphael, the physical therapist, appeared in the mirror behind Cas. Raphael was a small-framed yet physically fit man, wearing blue scrubs and a serious but not unkind expression. “Are we ready?” he asked in his slight West African accent, placing his hands on Cas’s shoulders. Cas nodded and let Raphael guide him toward a collection of bars, rings, and slings above the blue mats. _Like a playground for adults_ , Cas thought, smiling to himself. As Raphael’s prompting, he braced himself between the pull bars and lifted himself shakily to his feet. It was a strange feeling to be upright after so long only sitting or lying down; so alien to remember that his body used to move that way. Raphael coaxed his reluctant muscles, and step by wobbly step, Cas began the process of learning to walk again.

Cas’s balance got steadier as the days stretched into weeks. Somewhere in the middle of it all, in a flurry of hugs and well-wishes and scraps of paper marked with addresses and telephone numbers, Sam went home. In his absence, Cas focused on making his body stronger. There was something satisfying in watching his own progress; in, for once, being able to do something that felt like it was changing things for him. By midsummer, he had traded the wheelchair for a cane and received notice that he, too, was being released.

Cas did not leave in the wee hours of the morning, but in late afternoon when the sun fell through the trees in the parking lot in a dappled pattern like a scattering of bright pennies on the asphalt. Amara drove up in the same long brown station wagon Cas remembered her having when he was a kid, a bit more dusty and cobwebby-looking, but with the same sun-bleached fake-wood paneling and the same thickly upholstered dark chocolate brown seats like overstuffed sofas.

All of Cas’s belongings fit into an oversized shoebox, which Billie handed to Amara in the parking lot when she came outside to see Cas off, along with Raphael and – most surprisingly – Hannah. Each of them gave Cas a warm hug, but he could tell it wasn’t as emotional as the ones he’d witnessed between the staff and Meg when she’d left. It made a kind of sense, he supposed; if she was as much of a fixture there as she’d claimed, the staff had probably let themselves get attached.

Cas slid into the passenger seat of Amara’s car and watched through the warped and pockmarked glass of the side-view mirror as the hospital grounds slipped away behind them.


	5. Chapter 5

**Part Two**

Inside the gates of Amara’s property, she stopped the car just short of what she called “the garage,” though it was more of a precariously tilting shed. “You get out here, Angel,” she said. “I’ll bring your stuff. Don’t want you dealing with an avalanche in there.” Cas hoisted himself up on his cane and stepped out onto the unpaved drive, which consisted of two red-clay ruts the width of Amara’s bald white-wall tires with calf-high weeds growing on both sides and in the middle. Cas was still getting used to the feeling of standing, his legs jelly-like, unsure, like he’d just stepped off a boat. In the distant, unfenced pasture, he could see Amara’s half-wild horses running; among them, a gangly foal staggered along, his legs moving erratically as if they were independent of his torso despite being attached to it.  _ Like that,  _ Cas thought.

Behind him, he heard the car’s heavy steel door slam. Amara emerged from the garage holding Cas’s shoebox. The car itself had disappeared into the clutter of junk stored in the shed: stacks of warped boxes, newspapers and bottles long ago bundled for recycling and subsequently neglected, rusted and tangled bedframes and bicycles, a few skinny cats jumping between the piles. He could still see its back end jutting out but in this context, it looked like just one more broken and forgotten thing.

Amara came to stand beside Cas. “Is that smoke?” Cas pointed to a thin black plume rising into the air just beyond the reaches of Amara’s land.

“That’ll be Cain, tending to his bees,” she said.

“Bees!”

“He’s a beekeeper. Strange bird, that one. Lives over there, all alone except for that little girl of his, the poor thing.” She ran her eyes up and down the length of Cas’s body. “But for the grace of God, as they say…”

Cas had no idea what she meant by that, but something about the way she said it made a shiver run through Cas’s bones. Amara leaned over and tugged at the thin white linen of the hospital outfit he still wore. His own clothes, of course, had been cut off him. They never talked about that. “We’ve got to go into town, get you some new clothes,” she said. “I figured you’d want to settle in and rest first.”

Cas shrugged. “Sure, that sounds good,” he said. They turned toward the house, a jumble of unpainted and weathered wooden parts built around an old rusted house trailer, so many additions that the trailer itself was barely visible. As they waded through the tire ruts toward the house, Cas had the thought that this place had a way of swallowing things up.

He took the steps of Amara’s plank porch one at a time, bracing himself with the cane and pulling up one leg, then the other. Inside, the house was dim and dusty, full of knickknacks that seemed, to Cas, to be more uncurated than careless in their collection. The front room held an upright piano, and Cas’s eyes lingered on it for a moment, wondering who in the family might have played, and when. The top of the piano was draped in the same heavy, velvety dark-gold material that hung in the windows, blocking nearly all of the daylight from outside. It seemed shrouded, covered and put away. If it was Amara who’d played it, it was clear that she hadn’t in a very long time.

She led him into a small back room with a narrow Army-style bed pushed up against the wall, more thick curtains, and not much else. Amara smiled and said she’d leave him to get settled, then closed the door. She’d set Cas’s shoebox on a metal shelf whose only other occupant was a candle shaped like an owl, regarding Cas with unsettling goggled eyes. Cas turned the owl to face the wall before crawling under the heavy, slightly musty-smelling comforter on the bed and dropping into a deep sleep.

As promised, the next morning Amara drove Cas into the nearby town to shop for new clothes. There wasn’t much town to speak of; just three weedy streets of storefronts, most of which were boarded up. Cas counted a hardware store, a bait shop, a feed store, and a dinette with a plastic menu on which there were no items that were not deep-fried. Those seemed to be the only open businesses until they arrived in front of a two-story department store at the only intersection with a stoplight.

It was the kind of store that Cas could tell had once been upscale, but now everything in it looked faded and out of time, as if the racks had been stocked in the store’s glory days and left untouched as their wares went unpurchased. To the tune of tinny wordless music that reminded Cas of the music that played over the phone during a long hold, Cas and Amara rode a rickety escalator to the store’s upper floor.

It had been a long time since Cas had worn anything not issued by the hospital, and he was surprised to find that his body didn’t quite bend the way it used to in the process of getting dressed, even with the cumbersome lower-body brace removed and replaced with short, light splints. Amara had to help him in the dressing room, and the humiliation of being dressed – and seen partially  _ un _ dressed – by his aunt was quickly eclipsed by hot tears of frustration at being unable to wrangle his lower half into a pair of jeans, even with help. Amara bit her lip. “Maybe you’re not ready for these yet,” she mused. She disappeared and came back with the kind of slacks old men wore – elastic-waisted, with no belt loops or fly.

“Oh, no.”

“You can wear long shirts,” she said. “Besides, who’s going to see you but me, out here? And you know  _ I _ don’t care.”

Cas rolled his eyes, but resigned himself to trying on the pants. They felt exactly as ugly as they looked, with fabric that bunched and gapped in odd places and felt slick and unnatural against his skin. Still, they were relatively easy to pull on, with Cas only having to tilt back slightly and lift his hips off the edge of the seat for a moment to tug them up to his waist, which he could do. He decided the tradeoff of not needing to have his aunt help him put on his pants made up for their hideousness.

He let the bored cashier cut the tags off of a pair of the pants and a baggy shirt (that hung to mid-thigh and masked the beltless waist and awkward pleated front of his pants) at the register. Cas wore the new clothes out of the store and stuffed the white hospital outfit into the garbage can outside the sliding glass doors.

In the car, as they rolled back toward the edge of town, Amara asked Cas if he was hungry. Cas thought of the plastic menu at the dinette and felt his stomach clench. He shook his head  _ no  _ and they drove out of town.

Cas watched out the window as they wound through narrow country roads past scrubby woods, tumbledown cabins and trailers, the occasional small farm. Around one bend a flock of sheep bleated an alarm from a rocky pasture; around another, chickens pecked around an old school bus that was clearly being used as a coop.

As they neared Amara’s property, Cas saw that same smoke he’d seen the day before: black and greasy, with a wild, woody scent to it that Cas couldn’t quite identify. Another curve in the road and he could see a shotgun shack on cinderblock stilts, a row of what looked like little chests of drawers bordering the yard. As if reading Cas’s mind, Amara pointed through the windshield. “Oh, look,” she said. “There’s Cain’s place.” Cas turned and regarded her. “You were asking about the bees?” she said, as if Cas had forgotten.

Over near the cabinets, Cas could see a tall, thin figure holding some kind of torch. “What are those?” he asked, pointing to the row.

“Those are the hives! You’ve never seen beehives before?” Cas shook his head, picturing the hives he’d seen in cartoons as a child: oblong nests hanging from trees, dripping with bright yellow honey. He supposed he’d imagined that beekeepers had some other way of keeping the bees, if he’d had occasion to think about beekeepers at all, but certainly he’d never thought enough about them to picture it looking like  _ that. _

Just before the rise of Amara’s land overtook the road and everything but the smoke disappeared from view, Cas glimpsed the tail end of an ancient pickup truck parked next to the house. He felt a vague prickling sense of familiarity; he was sure he’d seen that truck somewhere before. But he couldn’t quite place where, and then they were over the rise and it was gone.


	6. Chapter 6

Cas spent the first days at Amara’s place hanging out in his room or on the front porch, reading one of the books Sam had given him or writing to him and to Kevin and Charlie, his only friends back at college – if they _were_ still his friends; he hadn’t heard from either of them since he’d been away. Sam had actually written to Cas, twice: once including a Polaroid from his family vacation to the Grand Canyon, the other time tucking in the birth announcement for Dean and Cassie’s son with I’M AN UNCLE!!! penned at the bottom. Cas still hadn’t finished a letter in reply. He’d started a half-dozen of them, but given up and tucked them into his shoebox when, each time, he just couldn’t think of anything worth reporting.

After a few days of this, Cas couldn’t take the inertia anymore. Folding and stashing yet another failed attempt at a non-depressing letter, Cas wandered back out to the porch, then, on a sudden impulse, made his way down off of it.

He picked his way along the red ruts, unsure of what exactly he planned to do once he got to the end of the drive but liking the feeling that at least he was doing  _ something.  _ About midway between the porch and the rough-hewn log gate, Cas noticed a footpath he hadn’t seen before. It was too narrow on the hard-packed dirt to accommodate both Cas’s feet and his cane. He tapped the cane on the grass beside the path to test its give and found it firm enough to hold him. Slowly and carefully, he made his way down the path toward the seam of Amara’s property over the rise at the end of her pasture. A stand of scrub brush at the boundary of the land obscured Cas’s view beyond it, but from several feet back he could hear a low droning hum coming from the other side. As he got closer, the brush pile seemed to vibrate with it.

Cas pushed aside a thin branch and peered through. It took him a moment to register that the white-painted boxes in front of him were the backs of the “cabinets” he’d seen from the road on the way back in from town – Amara’s neighbor’s beehives. The humming had come from the bees, who floated in effervescent clouds between the hives, lighting on their surfaces before taking to the air again. Cas had never seen a bee so close up before. He marveled at how soft they looked, how big in relation to their tiny translucent wings. He wondered how they could even fly.

He parted the branches further by angling the stronger side of his body against them, and stepped through the gap. Standing next to the hives, the buzzing of the bees was all around him. He stared up into the blue sky as they swirled around his head in a breathtaking dance, until he felt a slight tickle against the back of his hand and looked down. A fat bee was perched calmly on his skin. Cas moved slowly, afraid of startling it into stinging, but the bee seemed unbothered. He lifted his hand closer to his face and examined the bee. He wondered if it could see him; what he looked like to it if it could.

A flash of movement in the corner of his eye distracted him, and he looked up, instinctively dropping his hand. Unmoored, the bee flew away. Someone was pushing aside a curtain inside the yellow shotgun house. The shadows shifted in the window and Cas suddenly remembered everything – where he’d seen that truck before, what was so familiar about the posture of the man who tended the bees – as he found himself staring into the stricken face of Meg from the hospital.

Her mouth opened as if in a gasp, though he couldn’t hear anything through the thick, settled glass of the windowpane, and then the curtain snapped shut.

Cas still couldn’t do anything approaching running, but he hobbled as fast as he could around to the front of the house and up the long wooden ramp leading to the front door. Before he could lose his nerve, he knocked on the door. It was opened by a man he now knew he’d seen twice before: once out back, tending the bees, and once in the parking lot of the rehab center, loading Meg’s wheelchair into the back of his truck. The man narrowed a set of piercing ice-blue eyes in Cas’s direction, and Cas wasn’t sure whether he was suspicious or confused.  _ Maybe a little of both, _ he thought. “Yes?” the man said.

“Hello. I’m – I’m a friend of Meg’s,” Cas stammered.

“Oh?” The man seemed to make no connection between Cas’s claim of being Meg’s friend and his presence at their door. He continued to squint at Cas, unmoving.

“Yes, sir. Is she home?” The man closed the door in Cas’s face, leaving him standing on the front porch, staring at the blank wood. A few moments later, the door opened again. “She’s not home. I’m sorry.”

Cas, of course, knew that wasn’t true; in fact, he could hear faint sounds coming from the area of the house where he’d seen her in the window, the specific sounds of a person trying very hard to be quiet. But the face of the man on the other side was firmly set, and Cas knew there was nothing he could do to challenge him. Defeated, he turned and made his way back down the ramp, across the yard, past the hives, through the brush, and down the long dirt trail back to his aunt’s house.

That evening, as Cas sat in his room reading, Amara tapped on the doorframe. “Telephone,” she said, cradling the receiver against her chest. Contributing to the stuck-in-time feeling of her house in general, Amara not only still had a landline but still had one of the heavy black rotary phones that telephone companies used to distribute. Cas reached out his hand for the receiver, but Amara shook her head. “Cord won’t reach,” she said. “You’ll have to come out here.”

Cas pulled himself up on his cane and limped out into the hallway. “I set up a stool for you,” Amara said, pointing to it. He rolled his eyes, but hoisted himself up onto it with a charitable smile in her direction as she ducked away to give him some privacy.

Who would be calling him here, he wondered, and not on his cell phone? His father, maybe? One of his brothers? He lifted the receiver to his ear. “What are you  _ doing  _ here?” hissed a familiar husky female voice on the other end of the line.

Cas nearly dropped the receiver. “Meg?”

The phone line thrummed with an exasperated sigh. “Who else, genius?” Cas’s mind flooded with things he wanted to say to her, but it had the effect of water rushing into a kinked hose. There were too many words in his head for any of them to fit through his mouth. Finally Meg spoke again. “You didn’t answer me.”

“Answer…?”

“What are you  _ doing  _ here?” she demanded again, enunciating each word as if she were biting them off and spitting them out.

“I’m staying with my aunt.”

“Your aunt? The weird jam lady is your aunt?”

“Weird jam lady? What are you talking about?”

Meg blew out a breath. “Every Christmas, she brings me and my dad a bunch of this jam she makes from wild berries she grows on her land.”

Cas hadn’t been aware of Amara making any jam, but now that Meg mentioned it, he did remember seeing a large collection of glass jars with brightly colored contents in her pantry. “I guess so,” he said.

“Dude, that’s so weird,” Meg murmured. “Well, listen, Cas,” she went on, her voice not unkind, though Cas strangely flinched at the use of his given name. “I meant what I said. I’m not looking for new friends. I know we’re both stuck out here, and that sucks, but let’s still just let it be what it was, okay?”

Cas felt his breath tighten and knot behind his chest, but he managed to croak out, “Okay.”

“Good talk,” Meg said, and with a dull, distant click, the line went dead.


	7. Chapter 7

It was only boredom and the bees that brought him back. At least, that’s what Cas told himself. He had to do something with his abundance of spare time, and taking the path across Amara’s pasture gave him an excuse to practice walking. The first time he went back, only a few days after Meg’s phone call, he was careful to remain on Amara’s side of the property line, watching the bees through the gaps in the brush. He was so transfixed by them that he’s almost lost track of his surroundings when the clatter of something rolling on wood made his head jerk up. By the time he turned in her direction, Meg had rolled off the ramp and into the dust right in front of him. Fury flashing in her dark eyes, she demanded, “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“I’m just watching the bees.”

“My bees. And you’re in my yard.”

“I’m in my aunt’s yard.” Cas pointed down at the tangle of branches by his feet, marking the boundary.

Meg threw her head back and made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a scream. She spun around and wheeled back to the ramp, shouting over her shoulder, “Just don’t  _ touch  _ anything!” The boards of the ramp rattled again as she zoomed up it, then she disappeared into the house, slamming the door behind her.

Still, Cas kept coming back. It was true that there was something about the bees that he just felt drawn to. But if he was honest with himself, there was also a thrill in the mere proximity to Meg, even if she wouldn’t talk to him; there were moments when he could swear he saw the curtains in her window tipping back slightly, just for a moment, and then dropping again. That flicker of attention was enough to keep something stoked in him, and he couldn’t stay away.

Meanwhile, inside Amara’s rambling house, Cas began to take his first tender steps without his cane. At first, he scooted around holding on to the furniture, grateful for once for the clutter of it, the tight walkways between. If he lost his balance, there was always something to grab on to in order to keep himself from falling. Gradually, he held on less and less until he was able to walk around the house on two legs. Finally the day came that he decided to try venturing out to the beehives without the cane.

His gait was still a bit slow and unsteady, with a lingering limp on the right-hand side, but he made it to the property line without falling. As he stood there, watching the bees light and launch, he got so lost in their intricate rhythms that he didn’t see the curtain slide back in the window or hear the wheels roll down the the ramp, but he did feel the sudden warmth of a presence beside him.

“That’s how they talk to each other,” Meg murmured, her voice flat and low. Cas turned slightly toward her, but couldn’t speak. It was as if his breath and voice were caught in his throat; like a bee perching on the back of his hand, he feared any sound or movement would startle her away. “The bees,” she said, lifting her chin in their direction. “They dance. That’s how they communicate. It’s like a kind of sign language.”

Cas thought back to watching Sam and Eileen sign to each other on visiting days. Though Sam’s movements were clumsier and Eileen sometimes dissolved into giggles at his mistakes, both of them moved their hands with a grace Cas couldn’t help but envy. As he watched the bees dance around each other, he felt a surge of that same feeling, that coveting of a way of speaking without words.

“How do they even fly?” he mused out loud.

“I actually know,” Meg said. Cas didn’t dare turn closer toward her, but he could tell from the sound of her voice that she was, at least slightly, smiling. “It’s the wings. They move them from side to side, not just up and down. And they move really fast – like a hummingbird. That’s what keeps their weight up, even though it seems like it shouldn’t.” She swiveled on her wheels, angling her body so she was directly facing Cas and he couldn’t avoid looking at her. “You’re not using your cane,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound accusatory; she spoke in the same soft, slightly flat tone, as if she were still reciting facts about bees.

Cas couldn’t think of any way of responding to that, other than with facts. He shook his head. “No, I’m not.”

Meg didn’t ask the questions Cas expected, the  _ when _ s and  _ why _ s of it all. Her deep brown eyes were focused intently on him, but they were calm pools, giving away nothing below the surface. Her jaw was set in a firm line, but she didn’t look angry. Instead, she simply seemed resigned to something. “I want to show you something,” she said finally, spinning her wheels in the dust and turning in the direction of the house.

She zipped up the ramp, showing no regard for the way Cas lagged behind her with his slow and wobbly steps. She was already inside when Cas reached the bottom of the ramp, which he had to pull himself up by holding on to the railing on the side. She left the front door open, though, and Cas found her waiting in the living room inside.

In contrast to Amara’s clutter, the home of Cain and Meg was sparsely furnished and devoid of decoration; the living room, as Cas supposed the room they were in to be, contained only a sofa. Quirking an eyebrow, Meg wordlessly jerked her chin in the direction of a hallway leading through the house, which looked barely wide enough to accommodate her chair. Cas followed behind her, through a doorway leading into a room that Cas instantly knew was the room with the window he’d seen her watching him from. There was the purple velvet curtain he’d watched her pull back so many times, the only adornment except for a worn stuffed unicorn propped on her bed. The bed itself was a shelf built into the wall below the window, precisely the height of Meg’s wheelchair, and Cas was somehow certain that Cain himself had built it for her. He had the same certainty that Cain had built the unusually low shelves in the closet that Meg rolled into, pulled a faded lavender shoebox down from the top shelf, and scooted back out.

She laid the box down on the bed and parked her chair next to it, pushing up with her hands and swinging her legs onto the bed. Once she was situated next to the box, she patted the bed on the other side of it. Cas sat down on the bed, and Meg lifted the lid off of the box and dumped its contents out onto the bed. A snowdrift of letters, cards, and photographs littered the surface of her quilt.

The envelopes all had Meg’s name written in the right-hand corner and a scattering of other names in the left: Benny, Ruby, Gordon, Garth. The pictures showed Meg at various ages with various hairstyles, holding hands with a muscular boy with a scruffy adolescent beard. Kissing a laughing brunette in a strappy tank top on the cheek, her arms wrapped around the girl’s waist. Lying on a blanket with a grinning boy in a denim jacket, her hand lightly scratching the tight fade of his hair. Cas had to look away, embarrassed by the intimacy of it all.

“Welcome to the hall of my hospital flings,” Meg said.

Cas felt at once repelled and fascinated by the hoard. There was something else, too: a deep sting at the realization that he was not special; that Meg hadn’t even lingered on him long enough to get a snapshot. He remembered Billie’s words in the hospital elevator:  _ Who are you corrupting this time? _ The implication finally made sense to him. There was someone for her every time. He was just one of many.

A Polaroid sticking out from the bottom of the pile caught Cas’s attention, and he pulled it out to take a closer look. In the picture, Meg was almost unrecognizable, her hair cropped short and bleached platinum blonde, her body even smaller and more fragile-looking. It wasn’t her that drew Cas to the picture; it was the boy whose lap she was sitting on. He was thinner, less filled out, and his hair was shorter and fell forward across his forehead in front, but his smile was unmistakable. “Sam?” he asked, holding up the picture.

Meg reached across the bed and snatched it from him. “It was a long time ago,” she said, tucking the photo behind her.

“I could tell,” said Cas. “But still… Sam? Eileen’s Sam? I thought they’d been joined at the hip since middle school.”

“They have,” she said. “But when Sam first had his accident, they broke up for a hot second. He passed that second with me.”

“Did they break up because…?”

“Because of his injury?” Meg gave Cas a withering look. “No. Well, not exactly.” She sighed. “When it happened, Sam was just so  _ angry. _ He pushed everyone away. Even his brother, and if you know him, you know those two are basically married to each other.” Cas nodded, remembering Sam’s visits with Dean; how, even when their respective significant others were there, they always sat next to each other. He could tell they had a bond that went deeper than most siblings’, though he’d never felt quite comfortable enough to ask him why. “Now, angry I can work with. Anger, I understand.” Meg put the picture back into the box, face-down, as if daring Cas to disturb it.

“So what happened?”

She shrugged. “What always happens. He went home, back to his real life. His real girlfriend made up with him, and the letters stopped coming.” With a deep sigh, she scooped the rest of the letters and photos back into the box and shoved it aside. “You want to know why I showed you all this?”

Cas nodded, barely breathing. “You don’t get it,” she said, and Cas detected a slight edge in her voice. “I like you. I do. But I can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“ _ This. _ ” She made a sweeping gesture in the direction of the box. “You all come here for a few weeks, or a few months, until you get better. And then you leave, and you leave me here. And I’m never going to leave, and I’m never going to get better.” Her voice sounded like she was fighting back tears. “Sure, you might come back once every few years for a minor adjustment, like Sam just did, but you leave again and I stay right here. And I am tired of being a place people visit.”

Meg turned her face away and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand before turning back to face Cas again. Cas couldn’t help it; in spite of himself, he felt a smile creep across his face. Meg scowled. “What are you smiling about?”

Cas chuckled softly to himself, which only made Meg’s scowl deepen. “It’s just,” he tried to explain, “my aunt lives here. I’m not going to disappear.”

Meg snorted. “And how long has she lived here, and I never knew you existed?”

“My whole life. Came here every summer until middle school. When did  _ you  _ move here?”

“When I was three,” Meg countered. “So that ball’s been in your court for fifteen years now, buddy.” She glanced meaningfully down at her legs, then back up at Cas.

“Oh come on,” he said, unable to stop smiling even though he could see that it infuriated her. “I’ve seen how fast you move. You probably could have crossed that field quicker than me, even before I – fell,” he said. Something strange passed over Meg’s face, but it was gone before Cas could be sure he’d really seen it. Just as quickly, Meg had reclined back on the bed, pulling Cas down beside her. For a moment, they just lay there like that, staring at the ceiling. There were swirls of plastic glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling in patterns Cas supposed would have to be called constellations, though they bore no resemblance to any he’d heard of. More puzzling to him was the mystery of how they’d gotten up there in the first place; they looked old and brittle, as if they’d been there quite some time, and he didn’t see how Meg would have gotten up there at  _ any  _ point, but he also couldn’t imagine Cain doing it.

Once he thought of Meg’s father, he immediately wished he hadn’t, because it only made him more acutely aware of the fact that he was lying on Meg’s bed, the warmth of her small body and the rhythms of her breathing palpable next to him. Wherever Cain was at that moment, Meg seemed unconcerned.

Her eyes still focused on the ceiling stars, she said, “Do you want to kiss me, Cas?”


	8. Chapter 8

Afraid to breathe or move, keeping his own eyes on the stars, Cas simply said, “Yes.”

Neither of them moved for another beat, then Meg said, “Well?"

Cas knew this script. He had had a couple of girlfriends before: Daphne, the detached one who’d simply drifted away, and April, the cruel one who hadn’t quite broken his heart since by that point he had forgiven too much to love her in the same way, but had still managed to wreck his self-esteem. He’d never had sex but he had kissed, lying down like this. He knew how it went. He let his body curve over hers, slowly shifting his weight half on top of her as their lips melted together.

The feeling of kissing her still knocked the wind out of him. He couldn’t explain it; it had never felt like this with anyone else before. He decided to just lean in and enjoy it, letting his fingers wander into her hair and tangle there, tugging gently, marveling at how soft and silky it felt.

Meg took his other hand and moved it up under her shirt. “Is this okay?” she whispered. Cas nodded and fell back into kissing her, letting his hand caress and explore. Meg’s hands, too, were exploring, running up and down his legs, venturing tentatively between them. From time to time, she would ask if what she was doing was okay; following her lead, he did the same before he let his own hand move downward.

Meg was wearing tight stretchy leggings under her flowing top, and Cas could feel warmth and a faint pulse between her legs even through the fabric. After she pulled his shirt off, he whispered, “I’ve never gone this far before.”

“I have,” Meg responded, which didn’t surprise Cas, but what she said next did. “But I haven’t gone any further.”

He pulled back a little. “Really?”

“Yes, really. Just because I flirt a lot-”

“I didn’t mean that,” Cas said hurriedly.

“You did. But it’s okay.” Meg propped herself up on one elbow and turned to face Cas. “I was a kid when most of my flings happened,” she said. “Now me and Gordon were serious. I thought we were gonna grow up and get married.” She laughed, but the laugh was strangely without bitterness. “I used to imagine us rolling down the aisle together. Having a little family where we didn’t care that we didn’t look like other families. I’d get one of those little strollers I could attach to my chair.”

As she described it, Cas could picture it too, and he felt a sharp ache thinking of it.

Meg sighed. “Anyway,  _ that  _ didn’t happen.”

“Was he the one who…?”

“He was my almost.” Meg nodded. “Honestly it would’ve happened if we could’ve found a condom, but…” she shrugged.

The mention of condoms made Cas remember the one that was tucked in his wallet from near the all-too-recent demise of his relationship with April, when he’d thought they were heading in that direction. His stomach turned as he remembered how instead, one day, she’d come back to his dorm room that she’d unofficially moved into and announced that she was pregnant, then took her immaculate conception along with Cas’s toaster oven and his favorite sweatshirt and disappeared. The condom might have done April some good, but it didn’t end up doing Cas any.

He had the thought that, if this was happening, he was prepared – but would Meg think he had planned this? Cas was mortified.

He felt Meg’s hand trailing up his thigh, something questioning in her movements this time.

“Are you sure you want to do this with me?” Cas asked.

“Very sure.”

He leaned over and kissed her again, tugging up the hem of her shirt and lifting it over her head. In just her bra, the swells of her breasts were small but somehow struck him as perfect. He cupped a hand over one, feeling how precisely it filled him palm, how her chest rose and fell under his hand and he moved when she moved. He was taking in everything: the smell of her skin, the whisper-soft brush of her hair, the tiny sighs she made as their bodies pressed together.

Her hands reached for the waistband of his pants, and only then did he remember that he wasn’t wearing pants with a normal fly; he was wearing those awful elastic-waist ones his aunt had bought him. A mixture of embarrassment and panic washed over him, and he shrank back from her hands.

“Cas, what’s wrong?” Meg sounded concerned. Cas made a face and glanced down at the pants. Meg giggled. “Really, Clarence? You think that bothers me?”

Cas’s whole body warmed at the sound of Meg speaking her pet name for him. “I didn’t know,” he said, still looking down.

Meg hooked her hands into the waistband of his pants and tugged at them. “Anyway, it’s not your pants I’m thinking about,” she said. “It’s what’s underneath them.”

Cas could swear he felt himself blush, but in the dim light of the room behind Meg’s dark curtain, he thought, gratefully, she probably couldn’t see. He let her pull his pants down, over his hips and the growing erection inside his underwear. He turned to the side, letting his legs dangle over the edge of the bed as he took over, easing the pants down his legs and over the snags of his leg braces. He bent over to undo the straps and kicked them off, pulling his legs back up onto the bed and letting one leg slide in between Meg’s. She didn’t move as he pushed against her, but more soft breathless sounds and a tight grip on his back let him know that she liked it. Twisting from under him to sit halfway up, she unhooked her bra and let it fall off her shoulders. Then, lying back on the pillows, she arched her chest toward him. It felt like an invitation; like a plea.

His mind flashed on images of things he’d seen in glimpses of his older brothers’ porn movies; fantasies he’d had when he used to kiss Daphne or April, thoughts of what he might have done if they’d taken things further. Tentatively, he pressed a kiss to the soft flesh at the top of one of Meg’s breasts. Her skin there was warm against his lips, and he could feel it move with her breaths. Slowly, he slid his mouth down, circled his lips around her nipple, kissed her there. The dark skin around it was taut and puckered, the tiny nub protruding from the middle stiff. He licked it with the flat of his tongue and Meg gasped; encouraged and eager, he sucked the entire nipple into his mouth. Meg’s back arched beneath him, and he curved his hands under her to brace her body as it rose to meet him.

He slid them down to the small of her back, then to the top of her leggings. He tugged lightly at them, but Meg didn’t lift her hips. He stopped, pulling back. Meg, as if reading the concern in his eyes, took her hands in his and moved them back to her hips. “You have to lift my legs,” she said. “Or roll me to the side a bit. It’s okay. You can do it.”

Cas gently scooped his hands under Meg’s hips, lifting her slightly so he could grip the fabric and pull them down and off. Meg’s panties matched her bra: soft pink cotton, simple but pretty. She smirked down at them and back up at Cas. “You can take those off too.”

After he did, Cas felt overdressed in his boxers, especially once Meg slipped a hand inside and began to stroke him lightly. He pushed his own boxers down his hips and off, and knelt between her legs. The sight of her hand moving on him made him so excited that he had to look away and swallow the rising lump in his throat to keep from losing control. He clasped her hands softly in his and placed them around his waist, the same way she’d moved his hands on her body. She followed his lead and held on tighter as he leaned down again.

He remembered his wallet, and with a kiss on Meg’s neck he leaned over the edge of the bed to fish it from his discarded pants. He found the foil-wrapped condom in the folds and carefully extracted it, keeping it concealed in the palm of his hand until he got back to Meg.

He gave her a sheepish look as he moved to unwrap it. “This isn’t – I wasn’t-”

“Cas,” she said. “ _ Yes,  _ okay? I want this. I want you.”

Cas opened the package and, after a brief moment of fumbling and confusion about which way to roll it on, got it figured out. He carefully lifted Meg’s legs, spreading them, as she looked into his eyes and nodded, letting him know it was okay. He pushed into her slowly, still checking her face for any sign that he should stop. He did stop, halfway, as Meg winced and sucked in her breath. “Meg! Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “Keep going,” she said. With another push he was inside her, and he just held her like that for a moment, not moving, feeling her heart beat where their chests pressed together. This close, her skin felt so thin. He could feel every pulse. “Come on,” she whispered, and he started to move his hips, gradually picking up a rhythm. The feeling was almost overwhelming. Meg began making small sounds that encouraged him; he turned his attention back to kissing and licking and exploring everywhere above her waist, intoxicated by the feeling and taste of her skin and the louder sounds of pleasure she made each time he found one of the secret spots that made her body jerk under him. All at once, it was too much. The sensations that had been slowly building inside him toppled over like a tidal wave and left him collapsed and shaking against her shoulder. Cas felt Meg’s fingers playing lightly in his sweat-soaked hair as he gradually went soft inside her and, finally, their bodies separated. As he caught his breath, Cas was afraid to ask. “Did you…?” he ventured tentatively, unable to look Meg directly in the eye.

Meg shook her head. “It’s okay though,” she said. “It was nice.”

Cas shook his own head, violently. “No.”

“No?” Meg giggled, sounding incredulous.

“I need you to feel it,” he insisted. Remembering again his brothers’ videos, Cas had an idea.

“Cas, it’s not like I never… Cas, what are you… Cas!” As he kissed his way down her torso, Meg’s giggles heightened, then dissolved as his lips made contact with the seams where her pelvis met her thighs. He could smell her from there, like smoke and salt and something else, something all her own. He lifted one of her legs over his shoulder and moved his mouth inward to the center of her. She trembled slightly and whimpered just at his breath hovering above her before he moved in and kissed her there.

At first he wasn’t sure exactly what to do; he just let his tongue explore her, experiencing the tastes and textures of her. He discovered he loved it, took to it so much he almost lost himself in the sensations. Still, he noticed which places made Meg moan or grasp at his hair when he licked there, and focused his attention mostly in those places, changing up what he did with his tongue – fast or slow, flat or tip – feeling out what seemed to please her most. When he felt her thighs shake and she called out his name, her voice choked with something that sounded almost like a sob, he tried to pull away, but she gripped the back of his head tightly, pushing him into her. He stayed where he was until the shaking stopped and she let go of him.

“I just – wow,” Meg said, as Cas crawled up to lie next to her.

“Did you like that?”

“The answer to that question should be obvious.”

“Good.” Cas snuggled up under her arm, draping one of his over her as he lifted her nearest hand to her lips and kissed her fingertips. “So, you don’t regret that it was me?”

Cas felt Meg’s body stiffen and breathe deeply, in and out. The air coming out sounded almost like a sigh. “Cas, don’t…” she lifted his arm from around her, laid it back on the bed. “Don’t make this more than it was.”

He stared at her for a moment, then sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Fine,” he snapped as he started to pull on his clothes. Halfway through strapping his leg braces to his legs, he paused. “You’re always going to do this, aren’t you?”

“Do what, Cas?” Meg yanked the sheet up to her chin.

“ _ This. _ ” He waved a hand between them. “Let me in a little, then pull back. Make me feel like I matter to you, then throw me away.”

“Cas, what difference does it make? You’re about to go back to college. I have another year of high school before I could even think of following you or even being in the same world and-”

“And you’re so sure I would be exactly like all the others that you won’t even let me  _ try  _ to be different.” He turned to leave, finding his legs a bit stubborn, almost wishing he had brought the cane after all just so he could pull himself out of the room faster.

“I know you didn’t fall.” Those words made him stop in his tracks, turn slowly back to face her.

“What did you say?”

“I figured it out, okay? I know I was just, like, some little experience you had while you were a temporary cripple, that made you realize life was worth living and shit. I’ve seen this movie before. And I know you’re gonna realize that’s what it was too, sooner or later.”

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me!”

Meg shook her head bitterly. “That’s just it. Don’t you get it? I don’t want to be a thing that happened to you.”

Cas walked slowly back to the bed and sat down on the edge. “You talk about feeling lonely,” he said. “I came from a big family. I’m the youngest. My brothers and sisters pretty much raised me, since my mom died before I was old enough to remember her and my dad has been in and out of our lives ever since – they raised themselves, and since I was the baby, they raised me. And once all of us were grown enough to be out of the house, it was like we all realized we never had anything in common outside of having the same parents and we just stopped talking to each other. I don’t know if any of them even know I’m here. I jumped off that reservoir because I went to a party where nobody talked to me either and I left and nobody noticed and I just felt for a second like I would have to die to know if I was ever real.” He snorted. “I’m not sure if that made any sense. But when I was in the hospital, my brothers and sisters didn’t call me. My friends didn’t write. My dad didn’t come see me. The only person who ever seemed to care about what happened to me was…” He stood up suddenly. “I have to go home now.”

“Back to college?” Meg said from where she was huddled under the sheet, face still turned to the wall.

“No.  _ Home. _ ”


	9. Chapter 9

Amara was in the kitchen, lifting a kettle from the stove, when Cas found his way back inside and went to her as quickly as his still-shaky legs could, wrapping his arms around her waist and hugging her tightly. “Well, hey there, Angel!” she said. “What’s this all about?”

    “Is that tea?” he asked, pointing to the kettle.

Amara nodded. “Rosehip and chamomile,” she said. “Dried it myself.”

“Can I have some?”

“Of course, sweetheart.” She pulled two cups from the cupboard and carried them to the table, filling them with the tea. “Honey?” she offered him a little jar.

Cas eyed it, piecing something slowly together. “Is this…”

Amara nodded. “Cain’s honey. I’ve seen how you take to those bees of his; this is what comes of keepin’ them.” She scooped a generous spoonful into Cas’s cup and stirred it with the spoon. He took a sip and was overtaken by a perfect sweetness.

“I like it,” he said. He swallowed deeply, but found the words came easier than he had expected. “Auntie, can I come stay with you on term breaks?”

Amara reached across the table and put her hand over Cas’s, and only then did he realize it had been shaking. “Of course, Angel,” she said. “What brings this about?”

Cas shrugged. “I’ve just been thinking,” he said. “About… what family means, really, and who that is for me.”

She stood up, prompting him to do the same with a wave of her hands, and hugged him again over the table. “Come here any time you want,” she said into his ear.

 

 

The move back to college didn’t take a lot of preparation. Cas still didn’t have anything besides what fit in the shoebox. After sitting on the edge of his bed and turning it over in his hands for a little while, he left his cane leaning in the corner beside it. The clothes from the department store, he left too, after persuading Amara to take him into town one more time to pick up a pair of jeans and a simple plaid shirt, the closest he could get to his old clothes. The pockets on the shirt had tiny pearl-covered snaps. He almost liked it.

On the way back, Amara still couldn’t convince Cas to stop at the dinette, but he did agree to homemade ice cream from a roadside stand. He liked that too.

He crossed the pasture one more time, just, he told himself and almost believed, to watch the bees. He did find that they still calmed him just like they had in the beginning. He watched to see if he could see them dancing to each other but their movements just looked like regular flying to him. At one point, he thought he saw the window curtain move, but there were no wheels on the ramp, no voice beside him, for long enough that he knew it wasn’t going to happen. Looking up at the bees as they spun toward the sky, he remembered the feeling of going up in an airplane, spilling imaginary goodness over tiny towns. He wondered how far up a bee had to go for the world to look tiny; if they could even fly that high. He fixated on one bee as it rose up and up, until it disappeared into the overhanging branches and then he couldn’t see it anymore. And then it was time to go.

There was something about being back on campus after a long absence that simultaneously made Cas feel as though he’d been gone forever and as though he’d never left. Everything was still exactly as he’d left it, except they’d painted the dining hall yellow, and planted petunias out front where they’d had marigolds last year. Amara had driven Cas to the airport and sent him off with a fierce hug and a wave that kept going until she was out of his line of sight. On the plane, he’d watched the town shrink below him and tried to see Meg’s house, but by the time they were far enough up to see the outskirts of town, the houses were too small to tell apart. Back in his dorm room, Cas unpacked the shoebox and put his things back in the drawers. He left the empty box on the top shelf of his closet and blended back into the routine of his college life.

As his first break approached and his dorm mates were buzzing with their plans, Cas was stopped in the hallway by an unfamiliar freshman with frizzy hair and braces on her teeth, who handed him an envelope. “What’s this?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Came to my room,” she lisped around the braces. “It has your name on it.”

Cas turned the envelope over. CAS SHURLEY, it said on the back, with the right address for the dorm and the wrong address for the room. There was nothing at all in the space where the other address usually went.

Cas took the letter back into his room and opened it carefully along the seam. It seemed extra sticky, and Cas was surprised to find the stickiness stayed between his fingers when he pulled them away. He lifted his hand closer to his face and sniffed at it. Honey?

He pulled out the letter. _Hey Clarence,_ it started. His legs suddenly felt shakier than they had since his leg braces had come off, and he sat down on the edge of his bed.

 

 

_Hey Clarence,_

_I got your address from your freaky aunt. I knew she  wouldn’t say no to a girl in a wheelchair. So anyway, she tells me you’re coming back here for your break. So when you do, you know where to find me, okay? You took a lot of chances on me. It’s time I gave you one back._

_-Meg_

 

 

    Cas lifted the letter to his lips and kissed where the honey had been drizzled over the sealing glue. Then he stood up and walked to his closet, taking down the empty shoebox. He put the letter inside, one solitary white rectangle against the dull brown cardboard lining of the box. Somehow, he knew there would be more to add to it soon. He was going to need a place for them.


End file.
